Apple reveals new iPhones and Watch

Apple has made their yearly update to the iPhone lineup. They also updated the Apple Watch.

Design of the iPhone 7 is very similar to its predecessor. The biggest visual changes are the new Jet Black (Fingerprint Black) color and the mat black color that replaces the Space Grey. The camera lens is larger and still protruding and the antenna lines have been redesigned to be a little less visible.

The displays are still the same IPS LCD displays but like every year Apple has been able to squeeze just a little bit more brightness and color reproduction out of that aging display technology. They had to leave something for next year, I guess.

Under the hood, the updates have been more noticeable. The new A10 chip now has four cores, two high-performance and two power saving cores. This has bumped the battery life by 2 hours on the iPhone 7 and 1 hour on the Plus model. The 2 GB RAM has been proven to be enough on iOS. The base model storage is finally 32 GB, the upgrade options being 128 and 256 GB.

The iPhone 7 Plus has the typical Plus upgrades over the standard model. It has a bigger 1080p display, bigger battery and camera improvements. For the last two years the camera improvement has been OIS but the iPhone 7 also has it. The Plus model gets a dual camera setup. One camera is typical 12 MP F/1.8 shooter that can be found on the back of the iPhone 7 but alongside it there’s another camera with narrower lens. This combined with some software magic provides what Apple calls a true 2x optical zoom. The FaceTime camera has been updated to 7 megapixels.

The fingerprint sensor home button has been updated to Force Touch with no moving parts. The iPhone 7 and 7 Plus are now IP67 certified against water and dust and as predicted, Apple has ditched the 3.5 mm headphone jack. Luckily the new iPhones ship with Lightning headphones and a 3.5 mm adapter. It looks like recharging the phone is not possible while using headphones. The earpiece now acts as second speaker creating some kind of a stereo experience.

Apple also updated the Apple Watch. The new series 2 models are swimproof which means 50 meters of water in normal terms. The sluggish chip of the original model has been updated to S2 dual core one and the graphics performance has been doubled. Probably the most wanted new feature is the built-in GPS. The pricing remains pretty much the same. The series 1 model is updated with the S2 chips and gets a price drop.